Lesson: Stay away from categorical negatives at all costs. And when you do use them, make sure you have ironclad sourcing behind them.

Yesterday's Washington Post contained a nervy categorical negative. The story in question was a feature on the love affair between former NBA star and current Sacramento Mayor Kevin "KJ" Johnson and D.C. public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Written by the prolific and wonderful Wil Haygood, it was a timely and well told piece, full of insights on this now-very-public relationship.

Yet it stopped me dead in my tracks when it vouched for KJ's bona fides in the fidelity department. The fleet-footed point guard spent 12 seasons in the NBA, and here's how the story characterized his romantic record over that period:

"Unlike some, he was no womanizer in the NBA."

Now that's a whopper of a categorical negative. Saying someone didn't fool around over more than a decade in the NBA is like saying someone went to a beer festival and had nothing to drink. The NBA culture of fucking everything in sight is too well established to belabor here.

So what testimony does the Post display for this stunning contention? That of KJ's mom: "He had always said it was too hard in the NBA with all the traveling to have a serious relationship," the mother is quoted as saying.

Time to take this thing apart, piece by piece.

No. 1: The quote from the mother doesn't even support the contention that KJ wasn't a womanizer. In fact, it supports the possibility that he was. After all, if it's too hard to have a "serious relationship" in the NBA, what the hell do you do? Right: You womanize.

No. 2: Since when does a journalist rely on a mom to substantiate whether her son is a good man? Sydney Trent, Haygood's editor on the piece, responded as follows when asked about the reliance on KJ's mom: "While we quoted his mother we also verified the information from other sources."

And then, under a subhed that reads, "Negative Publicity," Haygood delves into some events that occurred at the St. Hope Academy, a nonprofit that founded to create a network of charter schools. Haygood writes the following:

Then came the darkness: The local press wrote about a 1995 case in Phoenix in which a 16-year-old accused Johnson of fondling her in a sexual manner. Police declined to bring charges following an investigation. In 2008, there was a similar allegation made against Johnson by a high school student at his St. Hope Sacramento High School. Rhee considered herself familiar with the inner workings of St. Hope High and didn't believe the charges against Johnson.

"It was a hard thing for me," she says. "I actually knew firsthand about the accusations. I knew them not to be true. Kevin just said, 'If people want to throw stones, let them.' " Johnson's accuser later recanted and no charges were filed.

There's no way Johnson could have asked for a more favorable treatment of these events. As City Desk reported last November, the details of the St. Hope episode raised far more questions about the protagonist than Haygood even comes close to acknowledging. Here's a more definitive abridgment:

Rhee didn't merely "consider herself familiar" with the "inner workings" of St. Hope. Oh no, that way understates her role in KJ's alleged misdeeds. According to a federal investigation into shoddy management practices at St. Hope, Rhee performed "damage control" when KJ came under fire. When inappropriate touching complaints against KJ surfaced, for example, Rhee essentially pulled an Al Haig, telling a school worker that "she was making this her number one priority and she would take care of the situation." After that, the administrator discovered that KJ's lawyer had contacted the woman who'd accused KJ of the sexual misconduct, and the accuser dropped the complaint.

In perhaps the most blatant instance of whitewashing, Haygood's story suggests that there was only one instance in which Johnson stood accused of inappropriate sexual moves at St. Hope. In fact, the allegations form a much larger, stinkier pile than that. Three separate instances of KJ advances appear in the federal report. Here are excerpts from the investigation (Note: the excerpts refer to "members," code for members of AmeriCorps, the national volunteer group that had placed workers in St. Hope):

Accuser No. 1:

One Member, [REDACTED] (Ex. 19 hereto), reported that, in the February/March 2007 time frame, she was entering grades into the SAC High database system per Mr. Johnson's instructions at the St. HOPE office at night, purportedly as part of her AmeriCorps service. [REDACTED] contacted Mr. Johnson to inform him that she had completed the grades and wanted him to review them. About 11:00 pm, Mr. Johnson arrived at St. HOPE and instructed [REDACTED] to gather her things and come with him. Mr. Johnson drove to [REDACTED] apartment, which is managed by St. HOPE Development and houses its AmeriCorps Members, purportedly so that they could review the students' grades. While in [REDACTED], in which another AmeriCorps Member had a separate bedroom, Mr, Johnson laid down on [REDACTED's] bed, [REDACTED] sat on the edge of the bed to show him the grades, at which time Mr. Johnson "layed down behind me, cupping his body around mine like the letter C. After about 2-3 minutes or so, I felt his hand on my left side where my hip bone is." Further, although not detailed in her written statement, [REDACTED], during the interview, demonstrated, while explaining, that Mr. Johnson's hand went under her untucked shirt and moved until his hand was on her hip.

The report alleges that Johnson subsequently tried to pay off the woman.

Accuser No. 2:

Another former Member, [REDACTED] (Ex. 20 hereto), reported that, while attending a St. HOPE sponsored trip to Harlem, NY, from June 26 to July 16, 2006, Mr. Johnson, on three occasions, "brushed [her] leg with his hand," including once "flip[ingj up the edge of her skirt. Other times, she stated, Mr. Johnson kissed her cheek, brushed up against her as he walked past, and massaged her shoulders. ([REDACTED] reported another incident that occurred in Sacramento, CA, in which Mr. Johnson touched [REDACTED's] inner thigh with his hand while enroute to a restaurant. [REDACTED] said she did not report the incidents to AmeriCorps officials at that time because she feared she would be terminated from the program and because Mr. Johnson was assisting her in obtaining acceptance into the United States Military Academy, where she subsequently enrolled.

Accuser No. 3:

In addition, former SAC High teacher Mr. Erik Jones (Ex. 12 hereto) reported that a former AmeriCorps Member, [REDACTED], reported to him, sometime in 2007, that, while at SAC High, Mr. Johnson had inappropriately touched her. Mr. Jones stated that [REDACTED] had reported that Mr. Johnson started massaging her shoulders and then reached over and touched her breasts. (Attempts to interview [REDACTED] have been so far unsuccessful.)

How could the Post have simply overlooked this publicly available testimony? When asked about the wider body of evidence against KJ at St. Hope, Trent responds: "The accusations were investigated by police and Johnson was exonerated. We made decisions that balance fairness and space."

There's every reason to chronicle this fascinating relationship—this city has needed an authoritative take on the matter for some time now. Bits and pieces in gossip columns do only so much to fill out the tale. Yet why suppress the most delicious parts? Why not put it to Rhee: A federal report cites three instances of inappropriate sexual behavior by your fiance toward young women. What say you?

Yesterday, I interviewed Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli for a story I was writing on the Washington Post Magazine. I was working on allegations that Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth may have played a part in killing a magazine story written by a freelancer who happened to be a friend of hers.

And as I found out in this morning's edition of the Washington Post, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz was working on those same allegations. Kurtz's story detailed how Matthew Mendelsohn had worked for months on a long narrative about Lindsay Ess, a woman who had had all four limbs amputated. When Mendelsohn mentioned the piece to Weymouth at a social event, she just about gagged, exclaiming that this was just another in a too-long lineage of depressing Washington Post Magazine stories. Of course, the publisher hadn't yet read the piece, but from the sound of it, BLECH! Depressing!

As Kurtz laid out in his thoroughly reported, perfectly timed piece that blew all my efforts out of the water, Weymouth didn't keep her thoughts to herself. Rather, she mentioned it to top editors, and the piece ended up on the spike.

And thus the question posed so timelily by the Kurtz piece: Did the publisher of the Post kill a story?

When I put this question to Brauchli, I got a definitive answer. The publisher, he said, played no role in killing the piece, which died via a "normal editorial decision." "Whatever Katharine may have felt about the piece was immaterial to the editorial process," said Brauchli in his chat with me.

That was a strong statement, I told Brauchli, but I told him I still needed to speak with the editor of the piece to verify the normality of this decision. I mentioned that I'd tried to reach the editor—Sydney Trent—but hadn't gotten a call back. Trent has since declared that she'll have no comment.

The top guy couldn't have been less sympathetic to my sourcing problem. "I don’t think it’s necessary for us to lay out all of the processes in the newspaper to make decisions," he snapped. "Newspapers spend way too much time explaining themselves." He went on: "Too many people call our newsroom. There are endless queries on our journalism these days. I think it’s better for us to focus on producing journalism than on our process."

When I opened the paper next morning to see the timely Kurtz piece (have I linked to that thing yet?), I discovered that the magazine editor had indeed explained her decision to kill the Mendelsohn piece. Here's the quote, which comes from a well-reported, timely piece that indirectly prompted a bout of screaming and swearing at a certain D.C. residence this morning: "Sydney Trent, the magazine's acting editor at the time, said she declined to run the story 'because it was clear the newspaper wanted to move in a different direction. That handwriting was very clearly on the wall.'"

Hmmm—is that what you'd call a "normal editorial decision"? On the face of things, it sounds like an editor frustrated with management, not business as usual.

So I put the question today to Brauchli—just how "normal" was this decision? His response:

I'd made clear to the magazine's editors that we were shifting direction, away from overlong, occasionally overwrought articles and towards livelier, more engaging journalism. Story lengths in the magazine were often too long, subjects were sometimes remote, and tenor wasn't always consistent with what other editors and I believe our readers want in a Sunday magazine. When Mr. Mendelsohn's piece landed, we were in the early stages of making the changes that the magazine editors knew were coming, and they acted in a perfectly sensible way to begin implementing those changes.

I should add that I have read Mr. Mendelsohn's piece, and it is a fine article, illustrated with some beautiful photography. Our decision not to publish it was not predicated on the quality of his work, but on the changes we were making to the magazine.

We interrupt this overlong blog item to consider that last sentence. So the magazine made a decision about a story that wasn't based on the quality of the story? Now there's an editorial principle for ya.

Actually, Brauchli's statement about the story quality not affecting the decision may be dead on. Mendelsohn says that he got the bad news about the piece from a junior editor at the magazine. Quite naturally, Mendelsohn wanted to know what the mag's boss—Trent—had to say about the piece. "I asked my editor what she—meaning, the acting editor of the magazine—thought of it, and there was a moment of silence and she said, 'She didn’t read it.'" (Update: Trent just e-mailed to say that she did indeed read the story.)

Normal editorial decision?

Executive editor's protestations notwithstanding, a publisher's opinion about a pending story is a terribly hard thing to bottle up, especially in a newsroom filled with Twittering, texting, e-mailing, mouth-talking gossips. "I probably should have kept my mouth shut," says Weymouth. "I fully expected them to publish it." As evidence that she didn't imagine she'd influence the editorial process, Weymouth noted that she'd been pushing for "four and a half years" for a wedding column—a feature that appeared only recently in the pages of the Post.

Update: Check out the piece by Slate's Jack Shafer on why the boss needs to be careful about critical ketchup-and-mustard decisions.

Stay tuned for City Desk's Next Piece on the Washington Post Magazine: What Do L&B Mean to You?

Washington Post reporter Paul Duggan spent four months reporting and writing a two-part series on a juicy local murder case. The results were published on Monday and Tuesday, to great public acclaim. Yet faithful subscribers who scoop up their paper on the front steps each day found none of it in their pages—only a few teasers sending them to washingtonpost.com.

Is this a bold experiment by a savvy media institution to herd its readership across platforms? Depends on whom you ask.

When Duggan started out gathering facts on the Aug. 2, 2006, killing of 32-year-old lawyer Robert Wone, he got some welcome instructions from his editor. "I told him not to worry about length," recalls the editor, Lynn Medford.

Equipped with his mandate to go long, Duggan threw everything he had into the project. The fundamentals of the story demanded a generous treatment by the local daily: On the night of his killing, Wone, who lived in Fairfax with his wife, was staying in the D.C. home of three friends. He arrived at the house at about 10:30 p.m. Not long thereafter, he would end up murdered, with three stab wounds and a bunch of needle marks all over his body. Semen was found around his genitals and in his rectum.

The three housemates–Victor Zaborsky, Joseph Price, and Dylan Ward—claim the killing was the work of an intruder. Police allege "a weirdly elaborate sexual assault involving the injection of an incapacitating drug," in Duggan's words. Plenty of material, in other words, to keep a reporter occupied for a while.

The two-parter kicked off with a frenzied 911 call from Zaborsky, who told the dispatcher, among other things, "Oh, dear. . . . I can't believe this. . . . I can't believe this."

The full 911 call was a scoop. And if original reporting also counts as scoopage, so did many other details in the Duggan account, including an in-depth look at the bios and "polyamorous" lifestyle of the three housemates. "Who were these guys?" asks Duggan in an interview, pointing out that in previous media portrayals, they were merely "stick figures." Another high point of the series is that Duggan explains why the cops maintain that Wone was injected with an incapacitating drug even though toxicology tests have come up negative.

One more plug for the project: It was presented in a compelling and seamless thread—great, great late-spring-early-summer reading.

Craig Brownstein, one of the editors behind whomurderedrobertwone.com, credits Duggan for adding fresh material, and then some: "I think the real value of Duggan's series was putting most of the pieces into one coherent and compelling narrative....We're just glad he tackled the project and did it in a thoughtful and thoroughly informative way. He's a crackerjack reporter and writer."

Yet the series wasn't compelling enough, somehow, for the Post's top editors. When Medford, a top Metro editor, shopped the completed product to the brass, she was told that it'd have to be hacked way down to make it into the paper. It was a "newsprint issue," Medford recalls being told.

The next stop for the Wone manuscript was the Washington Post Magazine, a logical resting place for such a narrative. But Duggan-Medford got the Heisman there as well. Sydney Trent, an editor at the magazine, writes via e-mail that the story didn't quite clear the publication's bar: "We weren't let in on the Wone story until it was finished and while it was the sort of finely-executed piece you'd expect from Duggan, it wasn't written as a Magazine cover but as a story for the front page. The differences in that regard are considerable, and it was too late in the game to go back and try to retrofit."

Let's halt this blog post right here to contemplate the load of garbage in front of us. First off, who cares if you weren't "let in on" the story till it was finished? That's territorial nonsense. Second off, a narrative is a narrative is a narrative, and this whole mag. v. front page distinction is precious and illusory. How many magazine readers do you really think would have clogged the Free For All page with complaints that the Wone story read too much like a piece from the front section? Third off: "late in the game." What game? The obstruction-of-justice trial for the housemates isn't till May 2010. This thing could have held all summer—who else was going to spend four months reporting the Wone case—Express? Fourth off, retrofitting is what editors are paid to do. Trent showcases the sort of overthinking that leads to disastrous editorial decisions: Here's a story that has new facts and a tight narrative about a murder case that involves polyamorous men and an electro-ejaculation device. End of analysis!

With no foothold in the magazine, the piece wound up as a Web exclusive. Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli suggests the placement was something of a strategic coup:

We wanted to try something new, offering readers a multimedia approach to a fascinating crime narrative about which we'd already written extensively in the paper. And it worked. Readers came, read, looked, interacted and commented in droves. As for space, we have plenty of space in print and in the magazine. The Post will publish stories, in print or online, at any length they justify. If you're suggesting that we're so constrained in print that we're putting stories online, that would be wrong.

Hey Brauchli: See testimony from Medford, above. Also: The Post hadn't already "written extensively" on the case. Its coverage was pretty much limited to "day stories"—breaking news pieces—as the case has progressed over the years. Also also: There was nothing terribly new about this model—the paper did just about the same thing with Bob Kaiser's monster series on Gerald S.J. Cassidy.

Why all the fuss here about Web-only publication? Brauchli's indeed correct that readers have logged on "in droves" to check out the story. So what's the harm in keeping it out of the paper?

Well, it's that subscribers don't get the best that the Post has to offer on their front steps. Post Ombudsman Andy Alexander has written that he's received complaints from readers about the online-only presentation. I'll speak up for this group. We, the subscribers, don't want to click through five pages of Web presentation just to goose pageviews and soak in a story that we'd rather read in print—that's why we, like, subscribe!

It would take a lot of transgressions for me to cancel my subscription to the Post, but this whole Wone thing is a step in that direction.

Keeping the story out of the paper also expresses a certain amount of news arrogance on part of Post leaders. It's as if they think that all the stuff that occupies the 16-or-so pages in the front section is just so precious that it cannot possibly be preempted for something, well, far more interesting and readable.

Take a look at the front section of Monday's Post, the day that the Duggan series debuted online. There's a lot of Washington Post gruel in there, lots of places where room could have been made for Duggan. For starters, there's an AP story on Monday regarding some illegal-immigrant probe in Colorado on page A5. There's some fluff on Valerie Jarrett on A13. There's a big, tepid front-page story looking back on the tenure of former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. And A3 carries a heading "Education Policy & The Nation," featuring a story titled "46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards." Perhaps some of that stuff could have gone Web-only?

Next time, Brauchli & Co. would do well to heed the lessons of the Chandra series of July 2008. Here was a project with virtually the same formula as the Duggan series: Famous crime + well-constructed narrative + incremental advances in reporting=smashing success with subscribers. When you have something like that, you put it on all your platforms—print, Web, cellular, Kindle, flying saucer, whatever.